Sun, Nov 21, 2010from BBC: Only 3,000 tiger left in the wildGovernments of the 13 countries where tigers still live aim to agree moves that could double numbers of the endangered big cats within 12 years.
The International Tiger Conservation Forum in St Petersburg will discuss proposals on protecting habitat, tackling poaching, and finance.
About 3,000 tigers live in the wild - a 40 percent decline in a decade.
There are warnings that without major advances, some populations will disappear within the next 20 years.... A recent report by Traffic, the global wildlife trade monitoring organisation, said that body parts from more than 1,000 tigers had been seized in the last decade.... "Some people are saying 'well, doubling the tiger population is good, but we have no room' - I've heard that said [in preliminary meetings]," he told the BBC.
"It needs to be done everywhere - especially we need to see a doubling where you have significant populations.
""If you leave tigers alone and don't kill them and don't poach them, then naturally they will double in 10 years."
...

Fri, Nov 19, 2010from BBC: Farms to harvest rare animal parts 'are not the answer'Farming rare animal species will not halt the illegal trade in animal parts, a conservation group has warned.
Care for the Wild says the fact that the animals are worth more dead than alive is hampering efforts to save species such as tigers and rhinos.
They add that selling parts from captive-bred creatures would not result in a halt of illegally traded animal parts and would instead fuel demand.
A kilo of powdered rhino horn can fetch 22,000 pounds on the black market.
Mark Jones, programmes director of Care for the Wild International, said recent media reports suggested that the South African government was considering "a feasibility study on some kind of farming or ranching of rhinos for their horns".
"This flagged up that these sort of farming initiatives are still being considered at quite high levels," he explained. ...

Mon, Nov 15, 2010from London Independent: None flew over the cuckoo's nest: A world without birds...It is nearly 50 years since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, the book that warned of environmental damage the pesticide DDT was causing. Today, DDT use is banned except in exceptional circumstances, yet we still don't seem to have taken on board Carson's fundamental message.
According to Henk Tennekes, a researcher at the Experimental Toxicology Services in Zutphen, the Netherlands, the threat of DDT has been superseded by a relatively new class of insecticide, known as the neonicotinoids. In his book The Systemic Insecticides: A Disaster in the Making, published this month, Tennekes draws all the evidence together, to make the case that neonicotinoids are causing a catastrophe in the insect world, which is having a knock-on effect for many of our birds.
Already, in many areas, the skies are much quieter than they used to be. All over Europe, many species of bird have suffered a population crash. Spotting a house sparrow, common swift or a flock of starlings used to be unremarkable, but today they are a more of an unusual sight. Since 1977, Britain's house-sparrow population has shrunk by 68 per cent. ...